When I hold the brush to paint an image, I sense my emotions exceeding far beyond its limitations.

The blood that runs throughout my body tingles with excitement, and I cannot help but inscribe this overwhelmingly vivid experience onto the canvas.

Once my mind is able to transcend its limits, I confront the canvas in a temperament like that of a brave warrior.

When I take a long and deep breath and exhale, the heat transmitted from my fingertips transforms into colors and forms, eventually giving birth to a narrative.

I don’t wish to contemplate and paint something that resides in my mind. By delving into and excavating space and memory, I once again want to encounter the experiences that are vividly resurrected.

In a manner as if exploring, I allow emotion, memory, and the now to coalesce, again making my mark upon the canvas.

Like my work that will come to embody another personality and continue live on even should my flesh my perish, I sow the seeds of ‘paintings’ in my studio, instilling each one with water, light, wind, and heat.

A painting that is conceived here passes into the hands of another where it will continue to grow.

Soon it will bear leaves and blossom with flowers, once again giving birth to new seeds.

A painting for me is a budding seed of hope that creates the future.

Aki Kondo, May 2017

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Kondo was born and raised in Sapporo, and showed a great gift for painting at a young age, and the art world began to take notice of her extraordinary talent while she was still a student at Tohoku University of Art and Design. The Great East Japan Earthquake, which struck in 2011 when she was in graduate school, had both a direct and an indirect impact on Kondo, who was in Yamagata Prefecture just over a mountain from the affected area. After graduation she moved to Tokyo and held two solo shows at ShugoArts, while producing a series of other works addressing the theme of the earthquake. In 2014 she took a sabbatical from painting for one year to create the combined live-action and oil-painted animation film HIKARI, a cinematic requiem for the disaster victims, which was released the following year in 2015.

In 2016, at the ShugoArts Weekend Gallery in Mishuku, Kondo held a solo exhibition entitled Artist that reflected her experiences dealing with the music industry up until that time, which was very well received. Later, in the second half of the same year, she visited the Seto Inland Sea island of Shodoshima, which enchanted her, and she decided to relocate there. The upcoming exhibition featuring over 30 new works could be called a summation of her life as an artist in Tokyo over the past five years, which she has been producing while traveling back and forth between Tokyo and Shodoshima.